First Days

Well, Mark could definitely use some work as a tour guide. He did show me around the entire school, and therefore the town since they're very much mixed together, but was pretty much unable to identify any school buildings unless they held biology classrooms. Thankfully, I had gotten a map of town with school buildings identified on it when I arrived at my hall, so the tour from today combined with that should give me enough knowledge to find all my classes.

St. Andrews is really pretty, full of stone buildings and cobblestone streets. It's build on a peninsula in the North Sea, so it's surrounded by beaches on three sides. Castle Sands is the beach on the tip of the peninsula, so named because of the castle ruins that top the cliffs above the beach. Mark didn't seem to know much about the castle or the cathedral ruins that are next to them, so I'm guess I'm going to have to figure it out for myself. Apparently it's possible to tour them, but I've been told it's expensive. If I have the money for it at the end of the semester, perhaps I'll go. Or I'll just hop the fence one night and see what I can find. (Just kidding, Mom). The town itself is not very big, but it's packed with stores and restaurants crowding over narrow streets. All I can say is that it's a good thing people here don't have the American fondness for overly large cars, or they'd never be able to get around.

After we explored town for awhile, Mark invited Claire and me to join him for dinner at his house. Considering the food at my hall, I readily accepted, although once we got to his house, I began to doubt if this was the right idea. Apparently Mark is vegetarian but hates vegetables. Because of this, he spent all of last year living on pizza, but has decided to learn to cook this term. The original plan was to make sweet potato and spinach curry, but this fell through rapidly due to a lack of spinach and only one sweet potato. Needless to say, we had to creatively interpret the recipe. I think what we ended up with could only be called potato and sweet potato curry, and surprised all of us with its edibility. Although we might have overdone it with the chili peppers, I can still say our dinner was probably a good sight better than what my hall was serving that night.

Mark, Claire, Mark's roommate Tomas and I ended up playing video games for awhile after dinner, but then decided to meet up with Claire's flatmates to go out. I ordered my first legal drink! Well, second, I suppose, since I got one on the flight home from India last summer. But it was my first visit to a pub! We actually ended up going to three pubs, including the one located in the school's student union. It's interesting that I can not only drink legally here, but that no one even gives a thought to carding the students. I have to say I'm beginning to wonder if drinking would be less of an issue in college at home if we had a lower drinking age. I'll have to research this semester to see what I think.

Once we got out of the pubs, Mark, Tomas and I had a very interesting encounter with one of the managers of The Raisin, a pub that we had visited earlier that is apparently very popular with the students. Claire and her flatmates had gone off to go to a house party, while I went with Mark and Tomas so Mark could, unsurprisingly, get pizza. While at the pizza place, James, a manager of The Raisin came over and started talking to us. I get the feeling he's lonely in St. Andrews. A student here told me that everyone in the town is either over 65 or under 25, because you're either here to retire or you're here for school. It's a very accurate statement, but unfortunately James doesn't fit into either of these categories. He's about the same age as the students, but I think came here to play golf before getting injured. But to make a long story short, and also because I'm not sure how this happened, since my attention was on stealing Mark's pizza, the three of us ended up going back with James to hang out at his flat. While we weren't there very long, since it was getting kind of late, James told the three of us that if we were at The Raisin the next day at 2:45 the next afternoon, he'd give all of us and up to three friends of ours free lunch! Not bad for a first night out!

The lunch was actually really good too-- I just got back from it. Brits overcook their burgers, but who cares? Free food is free food!

The weather turned bad again when we got out of lunch, but I did get a chance to go to Tesco, the supermarket, and get some emergency food to keep in my room. I don't really have much to do this week, since classes don't start until Monday, but tomorrow is the first actual day of orientation. We have a few speeches to go to about living and studying in St. Andrews and then we finish registering for classes on Friday. I have to meet with an advisor to make sure that I'm capable of taking an "honours level" class here. I'm not sure what they're going to ask, but I'm sure I'll be fine. I only need to get one class approved, since the other ones I've selected are "subhonours level" and don't need to be pre-approved. I'll admit that I'm a huge dork in that I want classes to start up again, but I'll temper it by saying that I want to have more to do. Walking around town and exploring gets cold after awhile!